Important Facebook Graph Search Developments

When Graph Search was introduced back in 2013, it was an amazingly powerful people sourcing tool. However, recent changes have somewhat reduced its efficacy. While some people might think that Facebook’s Graph Search is effectively dead, it is still very much alive. In fact, Graph Search is now live on mobile (more on that in a bit).

Although it’s not what it used to be, Graph Search still allows you to write some very effective natural language queries to retrieve Facebook profiles, as you can search by title, company, location, languages, etc., and Graph Search is still a ridiculously powerful gender diversity sourcing tool (where legal, of course).

While people searches like that will satisfy the average user, hardcore sourcers might lament the loss of the ability to create the more advanced and inclusive queries they used to in the past, and the extensive search refinements associated with Graph Search on the right rail are now gone, with trending posts now taking up that screen real estate.

Once you try to go much beyond searches like the one above, Facebook will humbly apologize for not being able to find any results for your search.

Full-Powered Facebook Graph Search Lives!

If you miss the ability to construct searches the way you once could with Graph Search, you should rejoice, because the good doctors Frankenstein, Balazs Paroczay & Shane McCusker, have reincarnated the old Graph Search.

As far back as 2013, the ever perspicacious Balazs paid close attention to the URL’s when experimenting with Graph Search and he was able to piece together commands and utilize specific ID’s that allow you to construct Facebook Graph Search queries via custom URL’s and essentially search for just about any combination of information on Facebook profiles that you could possibly imagine.

If you paid attention to the URL of my example Graph Search for female software engineers who work for Google, live near New York and speak French, you would have noticed that the URL looks completely different in structure, which is indicative of the changes in Graph Search.

Semantic Search in Graph Search

The new Graph Search URLs looks like basic keyword search, but some level of semantic search appears to be happening, because when you search for people who have worked for a specific company you can see from the search results that Facebook’s Graph Search seems to “know” that “worked for” means “former.” Graph Search also “knows” what “live near” means, as evidenced by the non-New York (New Jersey) results.

You can notice that “old style” Graph Search via URL can be more precise and inclusive. For example – notice Jack who claims to currently work at YouTube (Google owned) concurrently with Mannequin. On the other hand, I did notice a result sneak in from Buffalo, NY.

Facebook Mobile Graph Search

You can easily craft some pretty powerful natural language searches simply by speaking them directly into the search field, which I did in the case below.

How nice would it be to be able to speak ALL of your searches as easily into any site in natural language and actually get the results you want? A man can dream…

The default search is for posts – so be sure to click next to the search bar and select “People” to get your people search results. In addition to searching for posts and people, you can also search for photos, pages, places, groups, apps and events.